


it's best if i drown

by hotmesslewis



Category: Historical RPF, Lewis and Clark
Genre: M/M, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-25
Updated: 2017-10-25
Packaged: 2019-01-23 04:08:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12498432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotmesslewis/pseuds/hotmesslewis
Summary: The rising tide.





	it's best if i drown

Ocean in view!  Clark felt the words slip from his mouth like a raindrop off a leaf, and was unable to stop them.  “Oh, the joy!”

Lewis, at the helm of another of the party’s canoes, glanced over at his co-captain, a fond smile playing across his worn face.  There was a noticeable difference even in the air itself around the men of the expedition, which marked the passage from the serene mountains to the coast.  There was a weight to it, a heaviness and a stickiness unlike any that Lewis had ever known except in the bed of the lover that made Lewis feel comfortably warm, even in the stinging chill of early November.  The breeze from the sea danced around the men in their boats, pulling through their hair and humming through the hollowness of the boats.  It lifted Clark’s hair, grown heavy and long in the passing months, into the darkening sky, where its intense red caught more than its fair share of the lingering sunlight.  The setting sun seem to light the water on fire and turned the white caps of the waves lavender.

The Pacific Ocean.  They had made it.  Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the rest of the Corps of Discovery were the first Americans to ever set eyes upon this wonder, the first to travel the great landmass of so much wild beauty and so much peril that would one day become the United States of America.

-

About a week later the Corps finally made camp at the border of the forest and the cold sands of the beach that burned white in the moonlight.

Late the first night, or more so very early the next morning, Meriwether Lewis carefully slipped into his clothes and out of the officer’s tent.  He sat at the place where the rising tide met the soft, virgin sands, staring out across the moon waxing three-quarters full on the water, and wondered how it felt to drown.

William Clark had felt more than seen Lewis stir, and watched half-asleep as the younger man’s silhouette dressed, but did not jolt to wakefulness until Lewis actually left the tent.  Clark’s heart thrummed in his throat, and he was unable to explain why.  He pulled on clothes of his own in a rush, not even bothering to tuck in his shirt into his soft leather leggings or even slip on his hunting frock against the late fall chill before stumbling out of camp in search of his friend and co-captain.

The urge to use his name, to call it out across the cold sand, was almost overwhelming, even though Clark spotted Lewis instantly in the bright moonlight.  He managed to hold the name, partially in fear of waking up some of the other men and ruining the quiet, beautiful moment of the man whom he loved, but more so in fear of the ocean’s wind ripping the words from his mouth and tossing them to an unfeeling sea.  So he walked to Lewis, silent save for the shift of sand beneath his bare feet, and sat down by him.  The impulse to touch him was almost a need, but Clark held back—Lewis’s posture, arms curled tight around the knees pulled to his chest, indicated that even the slightest caress would not be welcome at the moment.

Lewis looked to the sea, but Clark looked to the stars.  Neither man spoke for an eternity in the night, until Lewis’s thoughts broke through like a one of the waves breaking at their feet.

“William Clark.  We did it.  We actually did it.”  His voice was the laugh of disbelief.  “The Pacific Ocean.”

His posture loosened slightly, and Clark leaned into him affectionately.  “Yes.  Yes, we did, Meriwether.”

“It’s just …”  Lewis trailed off, turned away with a slight bemused smile.

“Unbelievable,” Clark finished for him, gazing at him tenderly.

“Yeah.”  The sat in the coolness and the silence a moment longer, and Lewis untangled himself to wrap an arm around Clark’s shoulder and pull the bigger man closer.  Clark closed his eyes in the comfort of his happiness.  Lewis voice was distant when he spoke again.  “What do we do now, Billy?”

Clark replied only with a soft moan as he rested his face next to Lewis’s and took Lewis’s earlobe gently between his teeth.  Lewis could not help but smile at Clark’s response, even as he pulled away in gentle protestation, but without real resistance.  Clark buried his head in Lewis’s feathery hair in response and breathed deeply.  The smell of the ocean masked the usual musk of Lewis, the gentle Virginian scent of pine, honey, and gunpowder.

“Just look at that moon, though.”  Lewis’s eyes were fixed, not on the sky where the moon sat suspended in perfect stillness, but rather on its gracefully rippling reflection in the ocean, stretching out from the horizon to the placid rush of water meeting their feet and lapping at their bare toes.  Clark turned his face towards the magnificent scene before them as well.

“It’s …”  Only for Clark would Lewis fight himself for the words he needed to express his feelings.  “It’s like the rest of the ocean is so dark and so deep, because it’s so black.  And if you tried to set foot, even in the shallows of that black sea, it would consume you whole.  But if you could just keep to those patches lit by the moon, you might be out of harm’s way.”  He paused for a wry smirk at his childish thoughts before giving words to them, but he kept speaking regardless.  Only for Billy Clark would he admit such things.  “It’s almost as though you could walk across that water lit by the moon, it seems so solid.  And if you could just keep walking, you could reach that moon.  And if you could reach that moon, you would be forever safe.”  His voice sank to a whisper.  “And happy.”

Clark was spellbound by the image that Lewis had created for him, and sat up straighter as he looked across the ocean, almost as if he could see the two of them, walking across that path of light and into the safety of that bright moon.  His heart fell with Lewis’s final two words.  He turned to the younger man, the sadder man, the painter of this beautiful vision, captivated with determination.  “Let’s go there.”

Lewis smiled genuinely, brightly, but his eyes were murky.  “Billy.  Don’t toy with me.”

“I’m not, Meriwether.  I mean it.  You and I, stepping lightly across that sea and into the sky.  We could be together for all of eternity.  We could be at peace for all of eternity.”

“We couldn’t, though.”  Lewis offered no further explanation as he glanced down at the rising and retreating waves before them, but his voice was tinted with melancholy.  Clark took Lewis’s chin gently in his hand and turned Lewis’s face back towards him.  For a moment, they simply looked into each other’s eyes.  Lewis marveled at how Clark’s eyes seemed to reflect all of the brightness and the safety of the moon, while Clark worried at the darkness like the black ocean in Lewis’s eyes.  Then Clark closed his bright eyes and brushed his lips softly and fluidly as the sand against Lewis’s brow.

Suddenly the November night felt unaccountably much too warm, and Lewis shed his fringed coat as he dragged himself onto his knees.  He pulled Clark’s legs down from their peaked position and threw one of his legs over Clark’s as he straddled the man and turned his back to the sea.  Clark grinned up at Lewis and closed his eyes as Lewis pulled his hands through Clark’s thick red hair.  Lewis’s lips were on Clark’s jaw line, then down to his neck, lingering over Clark’s pulse as he could feel the change, as Clark’s heart sped as his heat began to build, before finally raising them to Clark’s mouth for a kiss chaste as a young girl’s.  Then, with a dark spark in his eyes, Lewis used the tip of his tongue to trace the outline of Clark’s lips, before pulling back to watch Clark shiver.

Clark took hold of Lewis’s hips and pulled the smaller man closer to him, raising his mouth to Lewis’s and parting his lips.  Their mouths hovered over each other’s as their breath mingled with the breath of the sea for a moment, before Clark took Lewis’s mouth to his.  They became a tangle of arms and cloth as they simultaneously tried to undress each other without breaking their kiss, Clark hooking his fingers at the waist of Lewis’s pants while Lewis’s hands played with the linen of Clark’s shirt.  They broke with annoyance in their desire to be together, Lewis standing to step from his pants as he threw Clark’s shirt across the white sand, Clark working off his own leggings, grown tight around his legs in the dampness of the sand.  Lewis stood before him, glowing white in the moonlight, his face unreadable as Clark gazed up at his beauty.  And then Lewis was on his knees again, pushing Clark down to lie on his back in the sand and the rising tide, parting Clark’s legs to let himself in, lifting those legs to his shoulders as he put his hardness inside of the other man.

Clark lifted himself on his elbows and watched Lewis with a silent wonder.  Both men were oddly quiet this night—perhaps it was the close proximity of the camp that silenced their moans, or the feeling of being so exposed to the world in the moonlight, instead of being together in the shade of the trees or the coziness of their own tent, or perhaps it was merely the fact that the rush of the sea and the breeze around them took the sounds from them.  But Clark merely sighed and whimpered softly, moistening his lips, as Lewis moved inside of him.  Once the name came to his lips as a wave crashed in like thunder, and Clark shook as the sand growing ever damper in the rising tide took their bodies.  As the water begin to rush over him, Clark wondered how it felt to drown, and as Meriwether Lewis reached his peak, Clark felt as though he might know.  Lewis’s fingernails dug into Clark’s leg, a hand ran down the inside of Clark’s thigh and trembled on his own stiffening length, and Lewis offered himself to Clark and to the sea.  In that moment, Clark realized that he had never felt closer to or more distant from Meriwether Lewis all at once, and he forgot to breath for a moment in the power of the feeling.  It was as though he were sinking into the remote blackness of the ocean—but then Lewis said his name, and the moon rescued him.

-

They laid back in the tide and the sand, the rising waves cleansing their bodies and erasing the evidence of their passion, and stared at the stars.  William Clark’s hand sought Meriwether Lewis’s, and Lewis gave a tender squeeze in return.

“Meriwether.”  There was no response from the man, but Clark continued anyway.  “I want you to know how much I love you.”

Lewis smiled in the night and wondered at his good fortune and his happiness.  He raised himself, propping up on one elbow, and leaned over the broad-shouldered man beside him.  The kiss Lewis offered was gentle, pure, lingering.  The tip of his tongue softly touched the part of Clark’s lips.

“You taste really good, did you know that?  Very salty.”  Lewis sat up and leaned over Clark fully, first leaning over and kissing a kneecap before parting his lips and running his tongue up the inside of Clark’s thigh, over his hip bone, and up the side of his chest.  Lewis lingered over Clark’s nipple, flicking it with his tongue first, then gently sucking on it.  Clark groaned in appreciation as he lazily ran his fingers along Lewis’s spine.

Lewis was a little bit breathless as he spoke.  “You taste really, really good, actually.”  He lay back down; his head curled next to Clark’s chest, and addressed the words meant for his lover into the sand.  “I love you more than you could possibly know.”

Clark smiled his gratefulness to the moon.

-

The next night it was William Clark who rose from his bed, who dressed with caution, who stole out onto the beach after hours of restless sleep.  Meriwether Lewis did not follow him, did not hear him, did not even stir from his dreams.  Clark sat in the surf alone and stared at the sky and sea.  Clouds covered the moon and left the world in utter darkness.


End file.
